It is not intended to suggest that there were no dissentients ready to bring forward objections to these almost unanimously accepted doctrines. We know that there were such, if only because it was deemed worth while to argue against them. Kepler and Newton had stirred men's minds by their account of the prodigious scale upon which the mechanism of the Universe was constructed, and Laplace had already enunciated the theory according to which the cosmic bodies were originally formed in obedience to the law of gravitation by the condensation of rotating nebulous spheres. And there were those who used these discoveries of astronomy to cast doubts upon the likelihood that the Divine attention would be concentrated upon the concerns of so tiny a speck as this planet of ours. There were others who maintained that the unbroken persistency of the order of Nature was evidence enough to shew that it had no beginning and could have no end.
Against both these objectors the irony and the oratory of a Chalmers was directed with what was held to be overwhelming effect. If the telescope had shewn us wonderful things, there was another instrument, he said, which had been given to us about the same time. If by the telescope we had been led to see "a system in every star," it was no less true that the microscope had disclosed "a world in every atom," thus proving to us that "no minuteness, however shrunk from the notice of the human eye, is beneath the notice of His regard."
So again, in an oration upon "The constancy of Nature," the thesis is most eloquently defended that "the strict order of the goodly universe which we inhabit" is nothing else than "a noble attestation to the wisdom and beneficence of its great Architect."[[3]]
Little did men dream at that time of the wealth of other discoveries that was soon to increase enormously the complexity of their problems; or of the inferences that would be drawn from them with an ingenuity and an assurance that would task to the utmost the ability and the patience of the defenders of the old beliefs.
It is of the new facts disclosed and of the further thoughts suggested by them that we must next proceed to tell.
[[1]] Summa, I., ii. 3.
[[2]] Essay on "Atheism and Superstition."